I walked slowly down the hill. The gunman behind me was not the boy who was my friend or a man I could ever know. But in a strange way it was as if I was retracing my life for a final time. The half of a moon had slipped way over Kingston. Off to my left and up the hill was White Marl School where Mrs Campbell would stand like a sentinel, and the white unpaved road of marl stretched up to it like a silver path up to the sky. And the dust that stung my legs was the same dust in which I played chevy chase and marbles with my friends. And the corner I passed was the same place I dusted Red Head in Mr Allen’s yard that day when we all sculled school together.

But the place I walked was a strange land, for the walls and the fences that once gleamed with paint and whitewash were now covered with slogans and the faces of politicians made blurry by the shifting light of the moon. And the words on the walls meant nothing to me. And the trees and the poles we had used as bases when we played chevy chase, and where we would sit to tell stories in the light that shone from the bulbs on them, these poles were now covered with paintings and tags and threats of a new and ugly time.

And my eyes were moist, and the images were strange around me and the memories flooded on and they did not match. Those memories of those times of made-up stories and mischief; of wandering the bushes in search of cows, days of chevy chase, hopscotch and marbles, did not match the place where we now were, nor the feelings that assailed me. For this was another time. Life had changed to war and friends had grown to men.

And I did not know how things could have changed so quickly or what could have remade us in such a short time ... nor why and how it could have been so easy for them to kill me ... how it could have been so easy to die, for nothing ... for nothing at all.